Back in
June 2012 we were saying
Arlington wrote:The EGE wrote:The list of mitigation alternatives is also up. It's mostly pretty uninspired - a lot of reducing headways on the rapid transit lines or on Somerville/Medford bus routes, and plenty of non-transit ideas.
I think they buried the lede: frequent off-peak Lechemere trains combined with a new 87E and 80E buses. Certainly that's how a for-profit enterprise would prototype/test the market for a BILLION dollar line...see if they can even get a blip with buses and admit that, yes, buses arent' great and that with rail you get 10x (or whatever) the lift. The willingness of *some* new riders to take the 80E or 87E to a better Lechemere (I often would) is proxy for the many more who'd ride a real GLX.
Well,
MassDOT is out with a final list of "Mitigations" they are willing to do because they've missed their GLX deadlines:
...on Page 18 they conclude:
the following three interim mitigation measures which collectively would meet the emissions reduction target for the [GLX]project:
• Additional off-peak service along existing routes serving the GLX corridor, including
-- the Green Line,
-- and bus routes 80, 88, 91, 94 and 96;
• Purchase of 142 new hybrid electric vehicles for The RIDE;
• Additional park and ride spaces at the Salem and Beverly intermodal facilities
Thumbing back into the proposal from June 2012, and picking out line items, I can't tell what the extra GL service would amount to, but based on the bus routes they chose (geo-targeted) I would guess they picked something like having both the D&E serve Lechmere off-peak and reducing their headways:
Green Line E Off-peak headways reduced from 8 and 14 min to 6.67 min
Green Line D Off-peak headways reduced from 11 & 13 min to 7.5 min
The buses were drafted as follows (and in descending order) I think it significant that they picked lines in Somerville/Medford very close to the GLX stations, but also emphasising connecting to the Red line (if people really wanted to ride these buses just "for the bus", they'd already be riding them). They had proposed:
Route 91 Off-peak headways reduced from 70 & 60 min to 40 min
Route 80 Off-peak headways reduced from 35 & 60 min to 20 min
Route 94 Off-peak headways reduced from 48 & 50 min to 30 min
Route 88 Off-peak headways reduced from 30 min to 20 min
Route 96 Off-peak headways reduced from 48 and 60 min to 20 min
And then there are the Garages at Salem and Beverly which are outside the Medford-Somerville area--why were they chosen? Quick? Taking credit for something they were already planning on the Northside?